Disciple James log: Jesus, let the dead bury the dead. Rebel alliance leader.

 

For James, the one writing here, another mystery seemingly solved. His soul, his mammalian brain, his nervous system does that sometimes.

Who could be so harsh as to say, let the dead bury their dead, don't go bury your father, there's work to do now? Well, it's something Obi-Wan might have said. It's something general Leia would have said. Although they wouldn't have needed to say it because people of the rebel alliance were facing the urgent truth not denying it like almost all of us do.

But different than the rebel alliance. Non-violent although possibly not religiously so, but morally and strategically so. Their weapon was radical Humanity, risking their own lives and not the lives of others. Giving their own lives, not offering to take the lives of others.

It was a time of revolution Jesus day. Many were yearning for a military leader to emerge and the scholarship suggests that Jesus was approached to be that leader and he refused. But he did not refuse to be a leader?

Strategically he saw that the people of his immediate group were doomed, going to be crushed by the romans, unless they threw off the threat. But how to do that? Militarily? Impossible. But how about spiritually? How about morally? What if they made themselves into such a incredibly moral Force that it disarmed the Romans which it might well have done in terms of wanting to destroy that group?

Let the dead bury their dead. From that and other things that Jesus said and in the way he acted it certainly seemed to be a matter of life and death for him as it is with a rebel alliance, the military type, but also the radically strictly moral type.

His moral army, resisting empire in all its forms, never emerged. 

But I realize that for my whole life I have been called to that army fighting alongside Jesus, for the joyful abundant Life of it, and I yearn for others to discover they have been called to the same. Maybe we'll be called to fight non-violently in concert.

To defeat empire in all its forms? Thousands of years too late for that. To save an individual here or there starting with ourselves from hellish meaningless life within empire now? Yes, that's the opportunity. 

And for the survivors generations hence, to rescue at least some shard of what it means to be human, what it means to be humane? That's certainly worth my life. Yours?

And are there none? There are some. These and those like them.